Another day, another Doom running on an inappropriate piece of hardware story. Gratifyingly, though, the latest gadget to run classic Doom, “works better than expected,” per the words of hardware hacker Aaron Christophel. Moreover, the target device is definitely an unexpected Doom host - an Anker desktop charger.
Yes, it is a ‘power bank,’ but the Anker Prime Charger (currently $169 with $30 code available) is the firm’s top of the line desktop unit with what some would call extravagant specifications. Some specs are more central to the device’s Doom hosting role than others, of course. For example, the classic 3D game won’t care about the device’s 250W power delivery, six USB ports, or GaNPrime power tech.
Much more important to Doom are the Anker’s 2.26-inch 480 x 200 pixels color display and, as Christophel points out, its SoC (System on Chip) the Synwit SWM34S with 8MB SDRAM and 16MB of storage.
If you look up that processor’s specs, you will see it has a 150 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 core. Whatever this chip’s capabilities, it seems to be enough to play this PC game which was introduced back when most home CPUs had just a single core and ran at about 25 - 33 MHz. Actually, Christophel comments on scaling the game resolution back a little on the Anker, to get the performance you are shown.
Probably the most surprising aspect of this implementation of ‘Anker Doom’ is how playable it looks. Christophel says that the single clicky rotary encoder to the right of the screen does an admirable job.
You can watch a good portion of gameplay in the embedded video. What he is doing is rotating the little nub to go forward and back. Push and rotate changes those directions to left and right. Lastly, simply clicking the rotary encoder pushes fire and opens gates in the game.
The rotary encoder is also the source of game sounds… In that there is no audio. You can just hear the encoder’s winding and clicking as you indulge in your frantic yet claustrophobic 3D retro carnage.
Christophel underlines this Anker Doom demo as running “completely without any hardware modifications.” He has only used the debugging header – you can see a few stray wires round the back of the device - for loading the game software.
Anker’s 250W Prime Charger is currently $169 on Amazon, and there is a further $30 discount coupon available at the time of writing.
As per our intro, Doom has been shoehorned onto some weird and wonderfully inappropriate platforms. Stand out examples include Doom on a lawnmower, on a Pregnancy Test device, and the game being ported to run directly from a PDF file.
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